The grasses (Poaceae) are the fourth largest family of flowering plants, with some 11,000 species. Grasses are worldwide in distribution, and they are components of most ecosystems. Grasses include many of the world’s crop species, such as wheat, rice, oats, corn, millet, barley, rye, and sugarcane, and have an increasing horticultural role. Given their ecological and economic prominence, grasses have a long history of scientific study. Agrostologists have made substantial progress identifying, describing, classifying, and elucidating phylogenetic relationships among the world’s grass species, but scientific exploration of the grasses is nowhere near complete. New species and genera are continually discovered and described, and genetic information is providing fresh insight into the genomic structure and evolutionary history of the family. Continued exploration in the field and laboratory will be necessary to further characterize grass biodiversity.

In July 2004, I participated in a month-long expedition to collect grasses in northwestern Canada. We were lead by Paul Peterson, curator of grasses, who has been studying the taxonomy and systematics of grasses for over 20 years. The second member of our team was Stephen Smith, museum specialist. I am a Ph.D. student in Sean Graham’s plant molecular systematics laboratory at the University of British Columbia, where I conduct taxonomic and phylogenetic research on grasses, their close relatives, and other monocots.

It was our goal to collect samples of all of the grass species that we encountered, specifically targeting Bromus (the brome grasses; ~160 species) and Calamagrostis (the reed grasses; ~250 species). These large genera are distributed widely in temperate regions around the world, and each includes several species that are important components of many ecosystems in northern Canada. Differing taxonomic opinions among floras in the treatments of Calamagrostis and Bromus in northwestern Canadaidentify several species complexes that need to be studied in detail in the field and lab to properly characterize species boundaries. One goal was to collect as much material of these species as possible to support future studies of these taxonomic problems.

On March 1, the National Museum of Natural History played host to an informative evening event, "Start with a Seed...At the Intersection of Gastronomy, Good Health, and Global Food Security,” co-sponsored by the American Institute of Wine & Food and the Global Crop Diversity Trust. Museum Director Cristián Samper welcomed the event’s guests to a panel discussion moderated by W. John Kressand featuring Peter Raven, director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, as the keynote speaker with panelists Nora Pouillon, chef/proprieter of Restaurant Nora, America's first certified organic restaurant; Geoffrey Hawtin, Executive Secretary of the Global Crop Diversity Trust; and Rayna Green, Curator of “Julia Child’s Kitchen” at the National Museum of American History. The panel discussions focused on the global origins of our foods, the factors threatening agricultural diversity, and the means necessary to protect and continue cultivating our essential food staples. After the discussion in Baird Auditorium, guests adjourned to the Rotunda to sample dishes from a diverse menu of culinary food crops prepared by sixteen of Washington’s leading chefs.

Maria Faust hosted two visitors from China, Guo Hao and Du Fei, on 27 January. Both researchers are from the NationalMarineEnvironmentalMonitoringCenter, Dalian, People’s Republic of China. Their visit was organized through the Office of International Relations, National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring, Maryland. The visitors received a tour of the United States National Dinoflagellate Collections. They were especially interested in ongoing research activities on the red tide and toxins producing marine harmful dinoflagellates. Harmful dinoflagellates often cause toxic out breaks in aquaculture facilities that result in unoxia in Chinese coastal waters, resulting in significant economical loss.

American Journal of Botany cover illustration: At the Cai Yung Hu Reserve in Yunnan, China, the single anther of a flower of Alpinia blepharocalyx (Zingiberaceae) deposits pollen on the back of a Bombus pollinator as it enters the flower to take nectar. (Photo by W. John Kress)

W. John Kress and research colleagues from China and Scotland have published a recent article in the American Journal of Botany on the classification of the gingers (92: 137-178; 2005). The study focuses on the genus Alpinia, which includes the largest group of species in the ginger family (Zingiberaceae). Species of Alpinia often predominate in the understory of forests, while others are important ornamentals and medicinals. Alpinia as currently defined includes six polyphyletic clades in the tribe Alpinieae. This paper provides the phylogenetic basis for erecting a new classification and generic boundaries of the subfamily Apinioideae, an equally important evolutionary framework for tracing the pathways of plant-pollinator interactions.

If the last few decades are any indication, we are headed for a major revolution in the way we conduct taxonomic research in the near future. The quantum leap in our ability to understand evolutionary relationships among taxa that resulted from the acceptance of Willi Hennig’s method of phylogenetic systematics, or cladistics, started the ball rolling in the 1960s. Our capacity to provide well-supported phylogenies has amplified the impact of the field of systematics on other disciplines, both scientific and applied. In one case the impact of phylogenetic thinking has been taken to an extreme. A few among our ranks, who have been called “phylogenetic fundamentalists” by some, have advocated (wrongly in my view) an entirely new system of nomenclature that abandons traditional binomials and the hierarchical Linnaean classification in favor of names based solely on phylogeny. This newly proposed system has not received much support among botanists, but it is an indication of the type of new thinking that is unfolding in the taxonomic community. Another event that radically changed the perception of taxonomy, biodiversity, and the value we place on nature was the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro that led to the Convention on Biological Diversity now ratified by over 180 countries. As a result of this international treaty plant inventory and collecting outside (and even inside) of one’s country has become a quagmire of rules and regulations governing the way we document and understand plant diversity. In addition to these theoretical and political developments a smorgasbord of new technologies is ready to overturn our traditional methods of managing and analyzing taxonomic data. Rightly or wrongly, the process of discovering, describing, naming, and classifying new taxa is changing.

One of the newest innovations that has taken the world of taxonomy by storm is DNA barcoding. The use of short DNA sequences for biological identifications was first proposed by Paul Herbert and colleagues with the ultimate goal of quick and reliable species-level identifications across all domains of life. These ideas have been applied most successfully in animals, although the usefulness and practicality of such approaches have been long accepted for microorganisms for which morphological data is limiting or difficult to obtain. Until recently plants have been notably absent in the early stages of barcoding even though a Consortium for the Barcode of Life (see http://www.barcoding.si.edu/) has been established to stimulate the creation of a database of documented and vouchered reference sequences to serve as a universal barcode library.

A new technology that uses short gene sequence bar codes to distinguish one species from another could revolutionize the world of taxonomy and biological collections. Scientists are developing a portable device that will provide a rapid method for non-taxonomists to identify unknown specimens and then link the information to a massive biological database.

In February, the Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL), which is hosted by the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), convened The First International Barcoding of Life Conference at the Natural History Museum in London. DNA barcoding, effective on most of the animal groups so far tested, including insects, fish, birds, and mammals, has not worked yet in plants. At the meeting, botanists unveiled the first concrete proposal to add a feasible system for plants. W. John Kress along with Lee Weigt, Director of the Laboratories of Analytical Biology, Ken Wurdack, Botany Research Associate, and Dan Janzen, tropical ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania, attended the meeting and presented their results on identifying a workable barcode for plants. They proposed a dual system that would combine a short nuclear region called ITS with a short, hypervariable intergenic spacer region of the chloroplast genome that worked in the over 100 species in their trials. The next step is to test this system on the 8,000 species of plants in the Central American country of Costa Rica. This project will be initiated in collaboration with botanists from Costa Rica and the RoyalBotanic Gardens at Kew with the generous support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

CBOL wants to tag every organism on Earth—starting with the 1.7 million species that have already been identified and continuing with the estimated 10–20 million that have not. CBOL members anticipate myriad applications of the information the new technology will yield, from enforcing food laws, to protecting wildlife and developing biodefense systems. A review of the barcoding conference in London appears in a recent issue of Science magazine (307: 1037).

Alice Tangerini (second from left) provides a tour of the museum for 21 visiting artists from Japan, including Mieko Ishikawa (standing to the right of Tangerini). This photo was taken in the Entomology office of Vichai Malikul (center).

Alice Tangerini was host to a group of 21 visiting members of the Japanese Association of Botanical Illustrators (JAPI) on 4 March. Tangerini was contacted by artist Mieko Ishikawa, whom Tangerini had met on a previous visit in 2003 when Ishikawa had exhibited her cherry blossom paintings at the Japanese Cultural Institute in Washington, DC. Ishikawa, along with JAPI president, Hidenari Kobayashi, organized the recent group visit to coincide with the exhibit of “Botanical Illustration of Japan’s Endangered Plants” at the National Arboretum. Tangerini arranged for the group to have a tour of the herbarium, graciously guided by Gregory McKeeon a last minute notice. Tangerini also escorted the group to the Cullman Library where Leslie Overstreet presented a display and a lecture on rare botanical books. Mary Ann Apicelli and Bernadette Gibbons provided the illustrators a tour of the Chairman’s office, which features a display of botanical paintings from the Department’s collection. Finally, the group received a tour of Tangerini’s office in Botany and illustrator Vichai Malikul’s office in Entomology.

W. John Kress recently published an invited book review of Flowering Plants of the Neotropics in the American Journal of Botany (91: 2124-2127; 2004). This extended review addresses the “Future of Paper Floras” and outlines new technologies, including electronic field guides and DNA barcoding, which have the potential to radically change how we understand, identify, and classify biodiversity. This same theme, “The Future of Floras,” will be the core topic in the 2005 Smithsonian Botanical Symposium hosted by the Department of Botany in April. Seven speakers, including Vicki Funk, and a keynote address by Rita Colwell, are lined up to discuss and debate the new technologies that further the inventory and classification of life on April 15-16, 2005, in Baird Auditorium at the National Museum of Natural History. The United States Botanic Garden and the International Association for Plant Taxonomy are cosponsoring the event.

The US National Herbarium recently received a gift from the National Herbarium of Canada, lichenology section (CANL), consisting of 1,599 lichens collected by Stephen Sharnoff and Sylvia Duran Sharnoff (Accession No. 2035962). These collections represent more than a decade of collecting by the Sharnoffs in support of their seminal work, Lichens of North America, co-authored by Irwin Brodo, a wonderfully illustrated reference published in 2001 by Yale University Press. These important collections supported the extensive research involved in the production of this excellent work and informed the accounts of most of the lichen species. The gift is significant contribution to the country’s largest and most important lichen herbarium here at the Smithsonian Institution.

If you watch a group of very
young kids, you can almost predict the ones who will develop a love affair with
maps. Before they know it, these same people have an attic full of National
Geographic Magazines and just cannot understand why the local library is not
thrilled to get a donation from them as they tidy up their lives at age 70 or
80. Maps are multifaceted. They are beautiful in their own right, and full of
fascinating information. They are often carefully framed and displayed as
valuable art objects. They tell stories from historic, political, and botanical
points of view. All maps are ultimately useful. Most of us have a stack of
utility maps to help guide us around unfamiliar places, and explorers of all
variety have relied on maps to guide them in their various quests. Jim Harle, a
Botany volunteer, is one of those kids who always loved maps.

The U.S. National Herbarium has between 8,000 to 10,000 maps of various varieties and vintages collected over time by Botany staff and others. They are scattered all over the department and throughout the museum. These are botanical maps of various ages and in many different languages. The problem was that the collection was not well organized, making it difficult to find a useful map. Outside of the central map collection, smaller assemblages of maps were located in various offices around Botany. Since there was no index to these maps, it was often a time consuming treasure hunt to find a specific map. They needed to be cataloged and made more easily accessible to researchers.